


walking barefoot in the snow, we set fire to our bones

by eternal_elenea



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Zombies, Gen, Implied Relationships, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-30
Updated: 2012-05-30
Packaged: 2017-11-06 07:40:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/416389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternal_elenea/pseuds/eternal_elenea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Martha's surrounded by ice and bullets and bodies and she's all alone. She's given up on waiting on the man in her dreams who never comes. Zombie Apocalypse AU.</p><p>Written for the <a href="http://magisterequitum.livejournal.com/524169.html">Zombie Apocalypse Comment Ficathon</a> on Livejournal. For the prompt: Doctor Who; Martha Jones; <i>and we are far from home but we're so happy</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	walking barefoot in the snow, we set fire to our bones

**Author's Note:**

> Title and Inspiration from "From Finner" by Of Monsters & Men.

It ends how it never began: alone and surrounded by monsters without anyone else, without anyone coming.  
  
  
  
Well, there had only ever been one "anyone" that mattered, anyway, and he was swooping through the galaxies with a smile on his lips and another girl on his arm and an "Allons-y" on his mind.  
  
  
  
It's a routine virus at first, back before Martha is called in. It's a mutation of pneunomia, just a small epidemic, they say, only it spreads a little bit quicker, only it's a little bit harder to trace, _only_.  
  
Only, within five days the Southern Hemisphere is ravaged, body count in the hundreds of millions, and within seven it's burning through the North.   
  
Only, the intel that comes in, half-phrases, blurred and breathed through decades-old comms, says it isn't just an illness. And when they say  _just_.  
  
  
  
There's frost in her hair and a hiccup on her lips and a wide, wide look in her eyes. There's a gun in her hand and she'll use it until the bullets run dry, until the team around her has turned into bodies like the rest of them, and then there's always fire. (She'll dig it from her eyes, if she has to.)  
  
She has an mission that will never die, that they won't ever be able to pry from her blood. She has a story, somewhere deep inside, of worlds that they've never seen and never will, of family and love and something unfathomable as infinity.  
  
  
  
She falls asleep to dreams of her mother's face, of Tish's words and Leo's laughs. She falls asleep remembering the world that used to be and not the world that is.  
  
  
  
The first word that comes in on the comm, the first real word, is "extraterrestrial," crackling through the airwaves; the second, and also the last, is "zombies" – a little boy's voice, scared, reverent.  
  
Martha is on a jet within the hour. She doesn't ask where she's going, but they tell her anyway: "South Pole, Ma'am."  
  
  
  
She awakens, to ever-grey skies and mountains of ice and  _bodies_ , screaming for a man that left a long time ago, that  _left_ and isn't coming back.   
  
  
  
Her team dies, one by one, because of course they do. They get dragged off, torn apart, covered in blood and saliva and Martha puts a bullet to their heads and then a knife to their throats, doesn't bury them when they're dead, looks as their eyes slide into white.  
  
They die and Martha doesn't, trudges on through the ice, and she's got a mission, she's got a mission.  
  
  
  
When she's a little girl, Martha wants to save the world and she tugs on the bottom of her father's shirt, tells him in many more words.  
  
"I'm gonna make people better," she says, "I'm gonna make everyone safe. Watch me, Daddy, I'm gonna save you too."  
  
When she's a little older, not much, but a little, she says it again in not so many, "Dad, I'm going to be a doctor."  
  
It's the proudest moment of her life, getting into medical school, until, well, until.  
  
  
  
This is not the story: grey skin and runny eyes and sharp teeth, a race of not people, but bodies, not-dead and not-alive and definitely, definitely, not human.  
  
This is not the story: news headlines, global crises, treatment centers, a spearheaded movement to nuke half of the globe.  
  
This is still not the story: a man in a blue box, dancing around the stars and telling the convenient tales and saving those he stumbles upon.  
  
  
  
She's been looking three days, seven days, far too many days; her fingers are numb and her toes frostbitten and she lifts her gun and shoots, shoots, shoots. She thinks slews of questions in the rhythms of bullets and asks none of them, keeps moving, doesn't stop.  
  
By the time she finds the source, she's lost count of the days and she's surrounded by bodies and all of her soldiers are either dead or out there with them. She's backed into a corner and she ran out of supplies weeks ago and she's Martha Jones, the woman who always survives, until she's not.  
  
She's Martha Jones and she's the best, but even the best lose eventually. (It isn't tic-tac-toe she's playing.) Even the best, they lose eventually, but, usually, usually they lose with a smirk on their lips and one  last  _trap_.


End file.
